The Computer History Museum announced today that it has, with permission from Microsoft Corporation, made available original source code for two historic programs: MS-DOS, the 1982 "Disk Operating System" for IBM-compatible personal computers, and Word for Windows, the 1990 Windows-based version of their word processor.

Great move by Microsoft - this ensures these programs remain available for eternity.

Ladies and gentlemen, by popular request, here's the real reason for this release: coincident with the end of life of Windows XP, the last vestiges of what in Misrosoft circles they referred to as "the Holy 2.0" version of DOS have finally been laid to rest.

RIP M$-DOS 2.0, now that XP is officially gone, (no longer supported,) it's okay to release code that still remained part of the OS for around THIRTY FREAKING YEARS, underscoring something I've been telling people for just north of two decades: underneath all the fancy splash-screening, and despite Misrosoft's best efforts to hide the fact, the "operating system" known as "Windows," from 1.0 to XP was STILL JUST PLAIN, OLD DOS!

They were actually sued for doing this very thing, when (whoever it was that owned the rights at the time) complained in federal court that by M$ DOS (I think 5.x to Windows 95's) deliberate generation of errors if Windows were run on top of a NON-M$ version of DOS, (like DR-DOS, a product that if memory serves, was superior in virtually every respect, no pun intended...) and later pretending to make DOS disappear. You see, it was still internally and functionally M$-DOS 7.0 underneath Windows 95, but that was hidden from the user.

Whoever it was settled out of court because, I guess, they had mortgages and car-payments to make, and the M$-Ill-Gotten-Gains-War-Chest was sufficient to drag the litigation out long enough to make them quit, and seek life elsewhere.

They hid it well, of course, but after enough effort was made to reverse engineer the "heavily XOR-encrypted code," it could be shown that Windows would check to see if the M$ Copyright message was there, in the DOS, and if it were absent, it would spit-out random, cryptic, scary-looking error messages. These weren't actual errors, mind you, they were basically "We notice you're not using a Misrosoft-branded DOS with Windows, so despite the fact it's a superior OS, we are going to try to frighten you into purchasing our inferior product" - errors.

Nowadays their approach has gotten more advanced. They build-in deliberate and intentional weaknesses, susceptibility to viruses that NO MODERN OS has ANY EXCUSE for being susceptible to, let alone one that is supposed to be the product of a company with decades of experience whose rat-hole has had untold billions of dollars poured into it by an unsuspecting and long-suffering public. They then periodically "discover" and "patch" them, probably introducing new vulnerabilities in the process. The idea there is of course that you'd have to be out of your mind to run an unpatched version of Windows anywhere, let alone on the Internet. Consequently, you need patches or "updates," which you can only get if you let Misrosoft inspect your computer remotely to make sure it's a "Genine" copy, that is... that you PAID THEM for it, through a process called "Activation".

The much-ballyhooed ease of breaking-in to Misrosoft-Windows based computers is not the result of simple incompetence, or the complexities involved in making an OS that can run on endless varieties of different hardware, since they long-ago strong-armed everyone into making hardware that their wretched software can run on. It's an ANTI-PIRACY measure.

In other words, they (Misrosoft) risk the SECURITY of your data, including things that may be personal and confidential to you, for the sake of THEIR BOTTOM LINE.

But hey, it's Misrosoft. What the hell did you expect?

What???

Seriously, are you retarded? Everyone knows that only versions of Windows up to Win9X are based on DOS. Windows XP is based on NT which has a completely different history and codebase than DOS, Win3.1, & Win9X. Know what you're talking about before you start posting random ass garbage.